Improving Literacy by Video Games

North Carolina State University has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) program, to develop a video game to improve the literacy of students. The game will emphasize scientific and technical literacy, a challenging area to students nationally. The team hopes to have the program rolled out and in use by at least one thousand students of rural North Carolina by September 2012. From there, the goal will be for 25,500 students to be playing the game each year by 2016. While that may seem rushed, they will be able to building upon “Crystal Island,” a piece of software one of the team members already developed to teach biology concepts to middle-school students.